Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

Michigan Is About to Have the Best Climate Policies of Any Battleground State

Governor Gretchen Whitmer is set to sign a package of ambitious decarbonization laws.

Gretchen Whitmer.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Michigan looks likely to pass an aggressive package of climate laws this week, as the state’s Democrats are set to capitalize on their first governing trifecta in nearly four decades.

The climate laws would require that 100% of Michigan’s electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2040, putting the state on par with the fastest state-level decarbonization deadlines nationwide. New York, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Oregon also aim to achieve zero-carbon electricity by 2040.

The bills would also open a new Just Transition Office within the Michigan Department of Labor and strengthen the state’s energy-efficiency and utility laws.

While other states have passed aggressive climate legislation, none of them are as politically contested — or quite as central to national politics — as Michigan.

“What’s really exciting is that this is probably the most purple state we’ve seen with a bold climate package on the cusp of the finish line,” Courtney Bourgoin, a senior policy manager for Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy group, told me.

“It’s going to be significant. This is a very pragmatic plan, but it builds off a strong foundation that we have in Michigan,” state Senator Sam Singh, who introduced one of the bills, told me. “It also positions us well to pull down the federal dollars that are available for this transition.”

Michigan’s Democrats are enjoying their first statehouse majority in nearly four decades. They have already repealed the state’s anti-union “right to work” laws and passed new LGBT protections.

The suite of four climate laws passed the state House of Representatives last week and is expected to go to the state Senate for a final vote in the next few days. The Senate already approved an earlier version of the legislation.

Governor Gretchen Whitmer is expected to sign the laws after passage. In August, Garlin Gilchrist, the state’s lieutenant governor, suggested in a speech that Whitmer supported the laws. Whitmer’s MI Healthy Climate Plan initially proposed zeroing out carbon pollution from the power sector by 2050, not 2040.

“The climate crisis is urgent,” Gilchrist said at the time. “We need to act now. We need to act legislatively. We need to act administratively.”

Here’s what the four proposed laws would do:

The first law sets a new, 100% clean-energy target by 2040. It also rewrites the state’s existing renewable portfolio standard to require that 60% of the state’s electricity come from wind, solar, or another renewable source by 2034. (The remaining 40% of electricity could come from nuclear power or natural gas with carbon capture.)

The second law sets new energy efficiency requirements for the state’s power and gas utilities. For the first time, utilities must spend at least 25% of their efficiency funds on low-income communities.

The law also encourages utilities to electrify people’s homes in the state by installing induction stoves or heat pumps. That’s particularly important because Michigan ranks among the top five states for use of home-heating oil.

A third law will allow the state’s public service commission, which regulates utilities, to consider climate and reliability questions while planning the state’s electricity grid.

The final law establishes a new Just Transition Office within the state’s labor and economic-development office that will advise the government about how best to retrain and help workers and communities who are hurt by decarbonization.

The office, for instance, could help connect “internal combustion engine vehicle workers” with retraining opportunities, counseling, skills matching, and potentially ways to replace their lost income. Most of its work would come from proposing new state programs, writing “transition plans” for various industries, or identifying federal funding. (My sense is that the office would be as effective and useful as the person directing it.)

“We’re going to be working with industry and workers concurrently,” Singh said. “I’m excited because we ensured that equity is part of the conversation as well as making sure we put strong labor requirements in as well.”

Another pair of proposals would let renewable-energy developers apply to the state’s public service commission for permission to build a project instead of going through a local zoning board. Michigan has highly restrictive local-level zoning rules on building new solar and wind, Sarah Mills, a University of Michigan researcher, told me.

While those proposals have passed the House, their fate in the Senate is less certain. The state’s fall legislative session ends on Friday.

Blue

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

Keep reading...Show less
Adaptation

Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

Keep reading...Show less
Green